Visitors travelled from the other side of the world to visit Mawnan Smith last week as the village school built closer ties with an earthquake stricken Nepalese village.

The head teacher of a school near Kathmandu and his wife visited the school after Mawnan's head teacher had gone on a humanitarian trip to their home village of Kokhana at Easter.

Visitors Arjun and Anu Maharjan brought gifts including a Nepali topi - a traditional hat - for Mr Brook, and told pupils about the experiences of the children at the Peace Garden School, which was destroyed by the earthquakes which hit their country.

He told the children: "It's a great pleasure to be here in front of you, I'm very lucky to stand here."

He said before the earthquake there were about 400 students, aged between three to 16 or 17, at his school, but they had lost around 75 who had had to leave after disaster to help at their homes, although some were beginning to return.

Following the quake he was unable to run the school for 17 days, and it was even longer before he could persuade the children to come back inside a large building, but when he did another quake struck the region, terrifying his pupils. He then had to run the school out in the fields for two months, before being able to use temporary buildings.

Mr Brook went over at one point to help with teaching at the school, while some of the group he was with were engineers who carried out improvements to the temporary structures.

He told the pupils that Mr Maharjan had actually been in the fields when the quake struck, and had seen a cloud of dust rising from his home village. As he headed back he saw people covered in dust, and when he got to his home he found it had collapsed with Anu inside, as well as his mother, but they were safely rescued.

Mr Brook said: "I consider it a great privilege to have visited the Peace Garden School Kathmandu in March, and even more so, to have the Nepalese headteacher and his wife visit us here in Mawnan. I have been incredibly impressed with the commitment and hard work that Arjun and Anu put into their teaching and running of their school.

"The fact that their house still lies in ruins, 18 months after the earth quake, and that they have to sleep in the school shows their total dedication to the children in the locality of the school."